This installment of “Conversations at the Newberry” explores the way the rise of digital technology has revolutionized journalism and the way the public searches for and consumes news. Traditional news media worldwide have been challenged to change their business models as readers increasingly rely on digital and social media platforms for their daily news. This digital revolution has also cultivated a proliferation of outlets and reporters (both professional and amateur), which, when coupled with heightened consumer demand for immediacy, puts media companies under increasing pressure to report the news in an engaging, rapid-fire fashion. Can reporters exist in this noisy information environment without sacrificing traditional journalistic standards of integrity and credibility?

Please join us for the next installment of the “Conversations at the Newberry” series at 6 pm on Tuesday, December 2, 2014, as Jack Fuller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and Owen Youngman, the Knight Professor of Digital Media Strategy at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, discuss the impact of the Digital Age on journalism, politics, and democracy.

About the Speakers

Jack Fuller, author of What Is Happening to News: The Information Explosion and the Crisis in Journalism, is a former president of Tribune Publishing, board member of the MacArthur Foundation, and novelist. A native of Chicago, Fuller served as a ChicagoTribune reporter in Chicago and Washington, D.C. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his editorials on constitutional issues. In 1989, he became editor of the Tribune and later was appointed publisher and chief executive officer. He joined the Tribune Company Board of Directors in 2001. His undergraduate degree is from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, and he has a law degree from the Yale Law School. Fuller is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Owen Youngman is the Knight Professor of Digital Media Strategy at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where he teaches and blogs about digital innovation in journalism. Before coming to Northwestern in 2009 he had a thirty-seven year career at the ChicagoTribune. Youngman served on a 1992 task force that created parent Tribune Company’s first explicit technology strategy. As the Tribune’s first director of interactive media in the mid-1990s he created the chicagotribune.com and metromix.com websites. In 2008 Youngman oversaw the launches of two print/online efforts focused on user-generated content: TribLocal and TheMash. Youngman’s writing has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Guardian, The Atlantic, the Huffington Post, and elsewhere.

“Conversations at the Newberry” is generously sponsored by Sue and Melvin Gray.